Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance

By David Frankfurter

This exploration of cultural resilience examines the complex fate of classical Egyptian religion during the centuries from the period when Christianity first made its appearance in Egypt to when it became the region's dominant religion (roughly 100 to 600 C.E. Taking into account the full range of witnesses to continuing native piety--from papyri and saints' lives to archaeology and terracotta figurines--and drawing on anthropological studies of folk religion, David Frankfurter argues that the religion of Pharonic Egypt did not die out as early as has been supposed but was instead relegated from political centers to village and home, where it continued a vigorous existence for centuries.


In analyzing the fate of the Egyptian oracle and of the priesthoods, the function of magical texts, and the dynamics of domestic cults, Frankfurter describes how an ancient culture maintained itself while also being transformed through influences such as Hellenism, Roman government, and Christian dominance. Recognizing the special characteristics of Egypt, which differentiated it from the other Mediterranean cultures that were undergoing simultaneous social and political changes, he departs from the traditional "decline of paganism/triumph of Christianity" model most often used to describe the Roman period. By revealing late Egyptian religion in its Egyptian historical context, he moves us away from scenarios of Christian triumph and shows us how long and how energetically pagan worship survived.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Jun 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9780691214733

Book preview

OVERTURE

THE ARMOR OF HORUS

IN BRONZE, in terra-cotta and stone, in graffiti and paint, the gods of Egypt began to appear in armor. They brandished swords and shields; they rode horses. They radiated victory over invisible forces of evil, even from a meter’s height, frightening demons from wall niches. They were, to be sure, those gods long popular for their powers to protect. Anubis the dog-headed god, Bes the leonine dwarf-god, and especially Horus, ever the avenger of Osiris and destroyer of demonic animals, the very expression of royal protection, came out of workshops decked in the equipment of the Roman military (see pls. 1 , 14 ).

And in this form the gods persevered. Still in the fourth century an Egyptian of some means commissioned a relief for a window in his house or his local temple that would project the god Horus’s ancient powers of vengeance and expulsion, but now according to the image of a victorious emperor. Thus he rides, in the famous Louvre relief reproduced on the jacket of this book, a falcon-headed warrior with breastplate and cape, pulling back the reins of his horse with one hand while impaling a demonic crocodile with the other.

The armored gods change with these new trappings of imperial authority; but all the while they retain functions essential to any sacred image of victorious power: to protect the household or sacred place according to the most basic traditions of warding off evil and certainly also to celebrate the timeless power of an ancient god. Coptic art historians have long seen a clear line of development between the armored Horus (and like gods) and the images of the great Coptic Christian military ridersaints like Saint George and Saint Sissinios produced in the sixth and later centuries. The connection is not merely form but what the images conveyed in the cosmos: apotropeia, repulsion, victory over chaos and misfortune. So it is with the obscure Saint Sissinios, portrayed on a chapel wall in the sixth-century monastery of Bawit astride a horse, with spear and shield in hand, repelling all the demonic forces that the painter could muster in his or her imagination: a scorpion, a snake, an ibis, two figures with animal bodies, and a voluptuous demon of concupiscence, through whom Sissinios drives his spear.

The armor, the posture, the triumph of this ancient image preserve the practical meaning of Horus through the end of the pharaohs, the decline of the temples, and the ascendancy of Christianity. And thus religion in its most basic and most traditional aspects, in its devotion to everyday safety and conservative allegiance to the image of divine victory, also continues by reasserting itself in ever new idioms and legends.¹

¹ Louvre Armored Horus (Paris, Louvre, inv. X5130): Clermont-Ganneau 1876; Pierre M. Du Bourguet, The Art of the Copts (New York: Crown, 1971), 89, 98; Suzanne Lewis, The Iconography of the Coptic Horseman in Byzantine Egypt, JARCE 10 (1973):27–63, esp. 55. Bawit St. Sissinios: J. Clédat, Le monastère et la nécropole de Baouît, MIFAO 12 (Cairo: IFAO, 1904), 80–81, pls. 55–56; Paul Perdrizet, Negotium Perambulans in Tenebris: Études de démonologie gréco-orientale (Strasbourg: Istra, 1922); Van der Vliet 1991:232–33. Similar Coptic images discussed in Michailidis 1950:91–101 and Barb 1964:12–16. In general on armored gods in Roman Egypt, see R. Paribeni, Divinita’ straniere in Abito militare romano, BSAA 13 (1910):177–83; Loukianoff 1936; Ernst H. Kantorowicz, Gods in Uniform, PAPS 105 (1961):368–93; Suzanne Lewis, The Iconography of the Coptic Horseman in Byzantine Egypt, JARCE 10 (1973):27–63; Grenier 1978; Dunand 1979:81–82; Nachtergael 1988:16 (#17). Armored Bes figures in Perdrizet 1921, 1:46–47, 2:XLI; Nachtergael 1988:16; Dunand 1990:38–39, ##30–33; and Török 1995, #119 (on horseback). A prominent graffito in the Kalabscha temple of Mandulis portrays an imperial (armored and caped) figure on horseback who is crowned with the feather-headdress of Amun by a winged being and who spears a barbarian (Castiglione 1970:99–101, figs. 7–8; identified as the fifth-century C.E. Meroitic king Silko in Trigger 1978:116–17). The image of a mounted Horus is only known from Roman sources: Plutarch, De Iside 19 (358C); PDM xiv.1219–20 5 P.Lond./Leiden xxxiii, 1–2. Military and rider gods became popular throughout the empire, often with regional characteristics: Delatte/Derchain 1964:261–64; Sarah Iles Johnston, Riders in the Sky: Cavalier Gods and Theurgic Salvation in the Second Century A.D., CP 87 (1992):303–21.

1

SCOPE AND METHOD

1.1 Introduction

AS MUCH as this book concerns Egyptian religion in its later phases (roughly 100 to 600 C.E. ), it is a study in cultural resilience, and it draws comparatively upon other such studies in order to answer the question, How does an established culture preserve its religious ways despite multiple pressures and traumas? And how indeed should one conceptualize religion so that meaningful answers might be found?

Roman Egypt has always held an ironic place in ancient history. With temples crumbling and hieroglyphs nearly forgotten and yet with startling evidence for the progression of Christianity, it has provided church historians (like their fourth-century forebears) with a convenient vantage point for watching the twilight of paganism and the rise of a complex ecclesiastical establishment. At the same time, with numerous examples of symbols preserved from ancient tradition in Egyptian Christian literature and art, the Coptic Christianity that was consolidated in the fourth and fifth centuries offers a rich deposit of pagan survivals, proving either the error of the postapostolic church (to some Protestant eyes) or the authenticating legacy of the pharaohs in the contemporary Coptic church. For even the most objective scholar Roman Egypt has served as a crucible for proving, or at least illustrating, one’s deepest assumptions about religious truth and religious change, and it is therefore a daunting task to cover this well-mapped ground without promoting one or another hackneyed presupposition about the rise of the church or the decline of paganism.

But several factors together beg for a reassessment of late Egyptian religion, whether in decline or in transformation, and I would name principally the ongoing publication of materials—literary, documentary, archaeological—from Egypt under Roman and Christian rule, an increasingly sophisticated anthropology of transitional cultures and popular religions, and the flowering of anthropologically informed studies of late antique religions and cultures.

Much of this book seeks to reframe the scope and context of religion as it should pertain to late antique cultures. I argue that religion in Roman Egypt should be understood first as a local, collective endeavor to negotiate fertility, safety, health, misfortune, identity, and collective solidarity. Understood in this way, the various historical ideologies that bound together many locales and regions within a single institutional framework (like the various royal systems of classical and Ptolemaic Egypt or Christianity itself) appear in complementary relations, if not outright tension, with local religion, akin to Redfield’s heuristic notion of a great tradition in dialectic with a little tradition. The belief-systems that characterized these institutions are neither distinctive of, nor irrelevant veneers upon, general piety in village and city. They provide, rather, idioms through which local religions and cultures can articulate their worlds.

And indeed some of these idioms become precisely the means by which native religious traditions are maintained, particularly in the public arena (the village festival, the regional oracle) but also in the icons of the domestic altar and the promotional literature of the priestly hierarchy. As the royal ideology had from earliest times allowed the promotion of regional gods, so Hellenism and its literary, representational, and mythological idioms brought native religious traditions into new scopes of authority and meaning, and so also did Christianity’s various idioms allow the redefinition and continuation of many kinds of religious practice. In this sense the subtitle, Assimilation and Resistance, is meant to challenge the simplistic notion of pagans deliberately fighting off Christian encroachment. While there are diverse examples of such conflicts, a culture’s resistance to conversion or religious decline often amounts to a complex process of embracing new idioms and ideologies in order to reinterpret them, to indigenize them. And following upon Egyptian culture’s profound assimilation of Hellenism, the native encounter with Christianity must be seen as part of such a complex process.¹

This book asks the reader to begin thinking about Egyptian religion within a local and domestic context, that context often described as rural or popular, rather than from the vantage point of some crumbling hypostyle of the New Kingdom or half-buried Ozymandias, compared to whose lost grandeur practically anything might look in decline. And indeed, the evidence for native religion in Egypt after the middle of the fourth century C.E. reflects this local and domestic sphere of piety rather than the elaborate and centralized temple cults of classical Egypt. There was, I argue, a progressive centrifugal tendency from regional centers toward local and domestic practice during the Roman period; but this tendency should be seen as a retrenchment of the basic spheres of religious practice rather than a decline of religion itself. Paralleled as it is in many other historical cultures seeking to maintain some symbolic continuity in the face of various traumas, a centrifugal tendency of popular piety can show the strength and resilience of local culture, not popular anxieties in search of a broader ideology.

To approach the transformation of Egyptian religion in this way requires somewhat of a new paradigm, as I argue in chapter 1. One reason for departing from the decline of paganism/triumph of Christianity model is that Egypt itself was different from other Mediterranean cultures that underwent great social and political changes in the Roman period. Religious systems and hierarchies in Egypt, for example, were entrenched in society, displayed in temples, and experienced in rhythms of the environment like the Nile’s annual surge. The native religious idioms—the central symbolism of kingship, the conventions of sacred representation, the gods themselves—had long dominated the interpretation of rulers, Ptolemaic and Roman, and the very deployment of Hellenism in culture. They were not nearly as subject to the ideologies of the rulers as other Mediterranean religions.

As a further component of our new paradigm, one must set oneself loose from a weighty theological legacy that assumes Christianity’s ideological significance to ordinary people, especially in the countryside, such that it could simply replace traditional worldviews. Indeed, one must reject a concept of Christianity’s uniformity altogether, except as an ideal in Coptic sermons. One must look at Christianization, as it were, from the bottom up, considering how the new leaders and ideas might be received by people practicing religious forms of great antiquity. Most of all, one must get beyond the notion that religions actually die, taking seriously the anthropology of small communities in dynamic relationship with ever-changing great traditions.

Following this agenda of looking at religious institutions from the outside in, chapter 2 discusses that axis of local and regional piety, the temple, stressing the ways in which people could interact with and, indeed, maintain institutions of such particular exclusivity. And temples in the third and later centuries (as in earlier times) do function within those essential religious contexts of fertility, healing, and safety, their priests meeting these concerns explicitly in temple ritual. So also through festivals and various organized and spontaneous demonstrations of support for the temple institution we can see Egyptian religion as a dynamic social system, not a floundering set of superstitions dependent upon the priestly purses. Even in the fifth century, when I focus in on a particular case of local religious patronage, we can see the strength of local self-determination in maintaining tradition.

Chapters 3 and 4 conceptualize religion according to concentric spheres of practice, authority, and identity, each of which is dominated by one or more gods or cults. The largest sphere would be the pan-Mediterranean, that ecumenical ideal for divinity and religious society introduced at the beginning of the Hellenistic period, following which we find the transregional cult, the regional cult, the interlocal, the local, and —leaping over the various cultic districts typical of towns and cities— the domestic. Realities were doubtless much more complex, as they have been in the Spanish and African areas in which this approach to religion has proven itself: inevitably, alliances, rivalries, ideologies, and interlopers (new oracles, prophets, immigrants) cut across the concentricity or at least complicate the nature of authority one might find in a particular sphere.² However, the concentric scheme provides an invaluable model for understanding both the nature of Egyptian religion in its static phases and the parameters of its change. Thus, while chapter 3 emphasizes the local and even centrifugal scopes of religious practice through late antiquity, chapter 4 discusses centripetal tendencies: oracle cults as regional or transregional centers, and their transformation or legacy in new religious centers.

Chapter 3 in fact argues that religion in Roman Egypt was essentially a localized phenomenon, neither a pan-Mediterranean paganism nor a monolithic Egyptian paganism. The Hellenistic forms in which one finds the Egyptian gods and goddesses (not only in Egypt but throughout the Roman world) represent not a tendency toward impossibly dislocated or otiose deities, as has sometimes been argued, but rather new idioms by which various priesthoods and local communities could articulate the powers and virtues of their particular deities. Finally, a variety of evidence for the continuity of domestic religious practices in late antique Egypt can, viewed comparatively, illustrate the ways in which cultures can maintain binding traditions when temples and public space no longer provide effective venues for religious practice.

The phenomenon of the Egyptian oracle is the subject of chapter 4. Based in temples and usually part of the temples’ festival processions, the oracle was traditionally the major context in which a community or communities interacted with the temple, its god and priests. In the Greco-Roman period the oracles of certain temples also became the dominant form of a regional or transregional piety, drawing pilgrims from afar. This discussion fills out the scope in which a popular piety should be viewed: essentially local but with broader spheres as well. Indeed, since it is this religious dimension that underwent distinctive transformations in the Roman period it provides a context for certain early forms of Christianity, such as the rise of holy men and Christian pilgrimage shrines.

Chapters 5 and 6 cover the vicissitudes of the Egyptian priesthood, its literary and ritual functions, into late antiquity. Egypt’s temples not only represented the religious infrastructure but also had stood as the axes of Egyptian religion for millennia, distinguishing Egyptian culture from other ancient Mediterranean religions in which priesthoods were neither so ancient nor so institutionalized or socially distinct. But it was precisely this institution that most directly suffered under Roman economic and, subsequently, religious edicts. Still, we find a variety of routes that Egyptian priests took to maintain their traditions, roles, and social authority. They consolidated their roles as ritual experts in a broad Mediterranean culture that upheld the magos as the epitome of Oriental wisdom, as we see in chapter 5. Using Greek and Hellenistic literary conventions and the synthetic writing system Coptic, they reinterpreted ancient legends, spells, and other traditions of the House of Life, the temple scriptorium, for an outsider’s culture anxious to plumb its hitherto illegible secrets (ch. 6). In both cases we can follow priestly traditions assimilated by Christian institutions.

Chapter 7 returns to the problem of Christianization that hangs over this entire book. Posed afresh the question becomes, What made Christianity appealing if Egyptian religion could continue in so many domains? I discuss three ways in which people found the Christian movements and their representatives attractive. But I make the point that, in the end, everyday and local realities governed the assimilation of Christianity, often to the point of producing rather vivid recollections of pre-Christian tradition.

This book admittedly covers less than its title might be construed as advertising. Even if not including basic introductions to gods, temples, and priesthoods in their Roman guise, the topic Religion in Roman Egypt should properly cover the complex mortuary cults, the veneration of the emperor, cults unique to Alexandria, the life and fortunes of those cults exclusively Greek, Syrian, Jewish, or of Asia Minor, and the complex, schismatic history of Christianity, a topic itself requiring coverage of Gnosticism and that hybrid movement that dominated the rural missions through the fourth century, Manichaeism.

Even while alluding to most of these topics in limited contexts, however, my purpose here is not to stress Egypt’s religious eclecticism, a somewhat worn topic that can be found in numerous books on the religious life of the Greco-Roman period. Nor is there space for a more basic introduction to the official infrastructure—the ranks and functions and calendars of priests, the layout of temples—than is absolutely necessary, for the focus is on the religious life of ordinary people in their communities.³

Other topics are neglected on more specific grounds. The cult of the Roman emperor, which was promoted throughout the empire with increasing anxiety and pomp, touched Egypt proper (without Alexandria) almost exclusively in Egyptian terms: that is, the emperor was revered in pharaonic terms (not worshiped: he is portrayed like the pharaoh offering to the gods), his image stood in many temples among the "associated gods [sunnaoi theoi] to receive the customary priestly devotions and in the occasional exclusive shrine that was visited and served almost entirely by Greco-Roman constituents. Coins portraying emperors with divine iconography circulated among some citizens. But the sporadic presence of the emperor cult, even more rarely as a distinct religion," seems to have had little effect on local or popular Egyptian piety.⁴

It is not the entire history of Christianity in Egypt that is relevant to Egyptian religion, but only those streams that in one way or another give voice to or grow in dialectic with aspects of traditional religion.⁵ So also Manichaeism, increasingly well-documented in its spread throughout Egypt from the third century on, nevertheless reveals a discrete society, albeit with an active mission in Coptic.⁶ The distinctive religious history of Alexandria, while certainly continuous with religion in Egypt proper, has tended to be given the dominant voice for the whole extended region because of the city’s prominence in the works of ancient historians. In this book Alexandria tends to stand for the intellectual pagan subculture of Sosipatra, Antoninus, Hypatia, and their chronicler Eunapius.

It is partly for reasons of space and repetition that I have left out a full discussion of mortuary practice, whose vivid continuity throughout the Roman and Coptic periods has been voluminously documented since the nineteenth century with necropolis excavations, mummies, mortuary texts and their analogues in Coptic apocrypha, and the epigraphy and iconography of grave stelae.⁷ But it is also because mortuary practices and beliefs in general are so historically resilient, so impervious to the vicissitudes of ideology, so intertwined with the self-definition of family and community, that their continuity in Egypt through the Roman period says little in and of itself about the broader spectrum of piety analyzed in this book.

What remains are the local and regional religious traditions of the land and its temples, followed by the interconnections this native religion forged with both the civic religion and intellectual paganism of the cities and the institutions of Christianization.

1.2 The Problem of Egypt in Its Mediterranean Context

The tendency among historians has been to put Egypt (and Egyptian materials) at the center of the broadest cultural changes in the Mediterranean world over the Hellenistic and Roman periods. And this concept of a great metamorphosis has had much influence on the way Egyptian materials have been interpreted. Often what has attracted students to the Greco-Roman period and late antiquity has been the notion and the conviction that key aspects of classical culture were in the process of metamorphosis toward Christianity. But at what point does our fascination with change and its implications begin to govern our grasp of an enormous range of materials?

There has, for example, developed a catalogue of cultural motifs alleged to be distinctive of the Greco-Roman period, like an individualism in crisis, a lapse into magic, a scurrying to oracles, a veritable bazaar of foreign wizards—in essence, an all-pervading superstition that either culminates in, or is vanquished and unified with, the victory of Christianity. Scholars have bent this image of the late antique mentality alternately toward downfall, like Gibbon, or awakening, as in Sir Harold Bell’s unabashed triumphalism:

Later paganism at its best has a singular attractiveness. It died with a kind of mellow splendour, like a beautiful sunset, but dying it was. It had been conquered by the truer and finer religion, for which it had itself prepared the way, a religion which at last brought the solution of problems which paganism had posed but to which it had found no answer.⁸

Trying to capture the mood of this liminal period in less cataclysmic (if equally spiritual) terms, other scholars have spoken of a failure of nerve, a pervasive anxiety, a cosmic paranoia, and a preference for an active religion.⁹ The intermediary aspect of the Roman period continues to be the issue—how Christianity was reached.

To illustrate these great changes scholars continue to draw upon the same eclectic set of sources—the same lives of holy men, the same inscriptions, the same novels and historiographies, the same papyri, the same Mithraea—all plucked haphazardly from many Mediterranean and Near Eastern lands and from more than five centuries of Mediterranean history. Even new sources tend to be assimilated to the same zeitgeist built out of the older sources. For example, an Egyptian oracle book preserved in multiple manuscript fragments is still quoted for its questions about everyday fate—Am I to find what is lost? Am I to recover from my illness? Am I to be reconciled with my masters? Shall I have a baby?¹⁰—as if to reveal that in this period no one could leave the house without deference to some charlatan’s advice. And the preface of a first-century herbal attributed to one Thessalos of Tralles, describing the author’s private epiphany in a chamber in Thebes, has been commonly invoked to express the decadent state of the old Egyptian religion: a crumbling Thebes in whose shadows aged priests pander hybrid religious experiences and magic to Greco-Roman youth.¹¹

Indeed, the images of change coming from classicists, church historians, and Roman historians are remarkably repetitive. But these are fields primed to see the Roman and late antique periods according to the starkest conceivable contrasts: the classical world, the Christian empire, and that interregnum in which somehow the first must become the other. The alternative perspective is one that subsumes the Roman period within the broader historical evolution of a single country or region. Does the Age of Anxiety then actually break down into much more complex regional developments due to distinctly unspiritual causes?

This is the case with Egypt. This trove of papyrological witnesses to an alleged decline in reason, rise in superstition, and bastardizations of noble Homeric divinities actually reveals a quite different picture if one appreciates the Roman evidence in light of continuing Egyptian traditions. What if we were to approach Roman Egypt by assuming the persistence of religious needs and consequent resilience of religion itself? What if we regarded new developments and innovations as potential vehicles of continuity and religious revitalization?

By this approach the old edifices of anxiety or spiritual decline begin to fall away. Materials on religious festivals in Egypt, which continue through the fourth century, prove that the temple cult was not a rickety formalism or near-ghetto but rather the dynamic center of religious activities that had continued for centuries, even millennia, the ritualization of environment and society.¹² That general Hellenistic pursuit of the urbane Greek divinities, immortalizing mysteries, or pantheistic saviors turns into a series of potential idioms for an Egyptian local religiosity that continued with astounding resilience well into the Byzantine period. The well-documented oracle cults continue archaic temple practices for communicating divine decisions.¹³ A preoccupation with attaining personal revelation and epiphanies distinguishes not a putative individualism (or active religion) of the Roman period but long and well-established Egyptian divination procedures among the priesthoods. The priesthoods themselves cease to appear as greedy anachronisms in a world embracing personal piety, becoming instead authoritative extensions of local religious solidarity. The popular wizardry for which Egypt was renowned in the Roman era and that seems to be well documented in the voluminous magical papyri becomes merely the traditional ritual expertise of the official priesthood.

Behind all these reassessments of the old historians’ truisms we find notable continuities of the classical Egypt of the Egyptologists: traditional festival practices, healing rites, fertility beliefs, the magical services and even literary pursuits of the priesthoods. Thus a third-century lament for Egypt bereft of its gods, its temples crumbling, its sacred voices silenced, signals not the gloom of a proper pagan beholding the inevitable advance of Christianity (or the destruction of the Serapeum), but rather one of several late forms of an archaic literature of chaosdescription, once invoked as contrasts to the ordering effect of the king’s accession.¹⁴ And this Egyptian lament is not alone in prompting such misinterpretations on the part of historians:

It was similarly believed by an older generation of Norse literature scholars that the theme of Götterd ämmerung reflected native anxieties about the encroachment and expected victory of Christ over the old gods. But this theme too was found upon more thorough (and less triumphalist) investigation to be much older than Christianity.¹⁵

If we then depart from such macroscopic perspectives on the Roman Empire that seem perennially to emphasize Christianization as some kind of end point and return to the dynamics of the specific culture and its internal processes and traditions, what do we find?

For all its firsthand documentation of a broad late antique mentality and for all the attention it receives from Greco-Roman authors, Egypt and Egyptian culture were in fact quite uncharacteristic of the Roman world. Administered in unique fashion by the Romans, a culture allowed to appropriate reverence for the emperor into its own iconography and religious idioms, bearing no traces of that Babel of self-styled wizards and conjurers whose dominance of other religious landscapes is so well captured in ancient authors like Celsus and Lucian, Egypt in almost every way stands apart from the rest of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds.

The reason for this difference in Roman views, of course, is the antiquity of the culture; but what does this mean? First, it means an economy based for millennia on the predictable annual cycle of Nile surges, around which crystallized both archaic social rhythms and equally archaic religious practices and mythology.¹⁶ Second, it means a continuously functioning, literate temple culture that was able to maintain religious practices, traditions, and ideologies even at the local level with varying degrees of centralization and yet little overall formal change over several millennia, a stark contrast to the comparatively briefer or less unilinear histories of Greece, Palestine, and Asia Minor with their great vicissitudes of religious centralization. And third, responding to this antiquity and this deep linkage of priests and temples with the culture, Romans—both emperors and authors—developed a vivid exoticism that combined (in often conflicting or alternating sentiments) a fascination with Egyptian wisdom—its priests, traditions, lifestyles, ideologies of kingship; a wariness and often outright fear of the popular power of these priesthoods that translated into both repressive and capitulatory measures; an insatiable hunger for the land’s produce; and a disgust for the indigenous people, their piety and habits.¹⁷

Many of the apparent changes in the religious culture of Roman Egypt seem much less striking when traced back to earlier periods: written oracle requests, for example, so well-attested from the Greco-Roman period, derive from the New Kingdom. In Egypt the major religious changes occur, first, through Hellenism, its new settlements and its idioms, especially as they defined new contexts for priestly traditions and ritual expertise (e.g., providing a niche for dispensing ancient wisdom and magic to urban youth), and second, through the economic decline of the religious infrastructure—the temple cults—in the third and fourth centuries due to Roman administrative pressures. This decline stimulated compensatory developments in priestly and temple functions and probably encouraged competitive religious systems.

In countless respects, then, Egypt’s various contributions to the image of religious novelty, anxiety, superstition, spiritual longing, individualism, or fruitlessness recede from distinguishing a distinctive spiritual current of the Greco-Roman period and fall into an ancient line of development, in which temples had risen and fallen continually and sages had repeatedly lamented the impiety and religious breakdown of their times. We cannot, to be sure, thus obliterate the sense that cultures changed in the Hellenistic and Roman periods; but we can assess the changes in their Egyptian cultural context.

1.3 Tracing the Continuity of Egyptian Religion in Late Antiquity

1.3.1 Sources

A variety of materials serve the reconstruction of Egyptian religion in the Roman period. Large collections of crudely molded terra-cotta figurines, lamps, and jugs illustrate popular, especially domestic, religious life in this period: the most accessible deities, the most important concerns (see pls. 1, 7–9, 13–15); and both the craft and some of the actual forms continue into Christian workshops (pl. 18).¹⁸ Papyri offer abbreviated, often enigmatic, but extraordinarily intimate documentation of priests pursuing their tasks, ordinary people preparing for festivals, supplicants requesting the guidance of a god.¹⁹ Papyri and inscriptions, both formal dedications and informal graffiti, which commonly illustrate the extent of people’s devotion to a cult through the dedication of structures or votive statuary, often provide exact dates.²⁰ Caches or archives of papyri, particularly when found in connection with a properly excavated archaeological site, offer the fullest picture of religious life in a particular area. Historians have thus been well served by towns like Karanis, Soknopaiou Nesos, Tebtunis, and several other remains of Egyptian culture in the Fayyum; by the city of Oxyrhynchus with its huge deposits of papyri still being published; by the oasis towns of Kysis and Kellis (the latter which is still revealing new materials); and perhaps most of all by the Upper Egyptian city of Panopolis, whose various papyrus archives document many aspects of religious and priestly life through the fourth century, after which we are blessed with the direct testimony of the fifthcentury Abbot Shenoute of Atripe.²¹

Shenoute is only the most acerbic and prolific of a number of Christian authors who described continuing native religion in various degrees of detail and polemical topoi: Paphnutius (fifth century), Zachariah of Mytilene (sixth century), the anonymous biographers of Pachomius (fourth century), Moses of Abydos (fifth century), Makarios of Tkôw (fifth century), the anonymous compilers of the Historia Monachorum in Aegypto (fourth century), and the Apophthegmata Patrum (fourth to fifth centuries), and the imperial historians Rufinus (fourth century), Sozomen, and Socrates Scholasticus (fifth century).²² Somewhat less biased reports of earlier Egyptian religious culture appear in the Roman historians and intellectual pagan writers like Dio, Strabo, Plutarch, Eunapius, and Ammianus Marcellinus.

Finally, there are fictionalized and didactic tracts, often datable only to the most general span of decades or centuries, which illustrate the religious interests of the literate in Roman and Coptic Egypt: cult propaganda and oracles; satires and novels like Lucian’s Philopseudes, Heliodorus’s Aethiopica, and Apuleius’s Metamorphoses; Hermetic instructions and revelations; the by-now enormous corpus of ritual or magical texts; and diverse narratives about late antique Egypt included in such texts as Thessalos of Tralles’s De virtutibus herbarum and the Recognitions of Pseudo-Clement.²³

1.3.2 Interpretation

Egypt gives evidence, paradoxically, both for Christianity’s rapid establishment in the fourth century and for the idiosyncratic and incomplete state of the land’s conversion by the time of the Arab conquest. One certainly assumes that the empire changed fairly rapidly to Christianity in the century following Constantine’s embrace of the creed. Whatever conversion should mean in such instances—and it most certainly did not mean an emotional or psychological dying to the old for the vast majority—a fair (if not by any means scientifically random) sampling of papyri from the fourth century has shown a quite large proportion of people giving their children biblical and Christian names by the end of the fourth century.²⁴ This observation seems to support the general profile of a Christian triumph over the course of the fourth century. But to assess what this means for religion as a whole one must balance such naming tendencies as one finds in certain towns against the large and diverse body of evidence for continuing native cultic piety through the fifth century and later.

If one combs through the archaeological and literary evidence from the eastern Mediterranean world, one finds that native religions continued in most areas with quite wide appeal up to and in some areas beyond the Muslim conquest. Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, and Palestine all reveal the slow and halting process of Christianization at the local level, a process often completed through violence or else through considerable compromise on the bishops’ part toward local religious practices.²⁵ And Egypt, which of all Mediterranean cultures offers the most extensive material on the antiquity, spread, subcultures, and political establishment of Christianity in a single land from the first century on, offers no different a picture of the survival of native cults.²⁶

Indeed, if one were to plot them on a map of Egypt the continuing traditional cults for which we have evidence would represent virtually every major region of Egypt—a compelling argument for the resilience of even more undocumented temples (see the frontispiece of this book). Priests record their visits and cultic services at the temple of Akoris through the late fourth century and at the great Isis temple of Philae through the fifth century.²⁷ Pilgrims’ inscriptions as well as the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus attest to the phenomenal success of an oracle cult at the Osiris temple of Abydos during the fourth century, only brought to a halt in 359 and then only because its archives revealed questions the emperor deemed subversive. Throughout the fifth century the temple was still popularly viewed as the dwelling of the god Bes, and some nearby cults continued with priesthoods.²⁸ Out in the Kharga and Dakhla oases the central temples of Kellis and Kysis were functioning well into the fourth century. The Vita and sermons of Shenoute of Atripe describe his battles with native piety in the region of his monastery; and an otherwise fantastic life of a contemporary, Makarios of Tkôw, gives a credible description of traditional local religion (surrounding a god obscurely named Kothos) at the time of his own crusades.²⁹ Eunapius, Rufinus, and Zachariah of Mytilene all describe a fairly thriving cult center within fifty kilometers of Alexandria that could only be replaced— forcibly—near the end of the fifth century.³⁰ A great number of papyri and inscriptions make reference to priests, festivals, and temple operations through the fourth century. And in the middle of the fourth century an anonymous Syrian merchant visiting Alexandria gathered the following about the regions up the Nile that he was not himself able to visit:

[Here the people are] eminently reverent towards the gods. At no other place are the mysteries of the gods thus celebrated as they were from ancient times through today. . . . For truly there we know that the gods have lived and still live.

. . . [In Egypt] the worshippers offer the gods most particularly representations [historias]. And there are all sorts of sacred objects and temples decorated in every manner; they are full of sacred custodians, priests, attendants, diviners, adoratores and the best holy men. Everything is done according to custom. And thus you find the altars always illuminated with fire and full of sacrifices and incense, the altar cloths emitting divine odors as much as the aromatic-filled censers.³¹

How should we balance these various testimonies against the even more extensive images of an entrenched and even multiform Christian institution in fourth-century Egypt?³² The perspective increasingly embraced by historians of late antiquity and taken in this book argues the collective nature of religion in late antique rural cultures, that it was not individuals but small societies—entire villages—that embraced or rejected Christianization or responded to its imperial or monastic agents and thus that conversion was by necessity a slow and patchwork process, dependent upon the singular charisma of a motivated bishop or abbot rather than some putative pagan decline or spiritual vacuum.³³

1.3.3 Christian Witnesses to Native Religion

Some scholars have sought to redress the balance of evidence by negating the value of Christian hagiographical sources as witnesses to ongoing native religion.³⁴ These sources, the argument goes, are so dominated by the agenda of extolling their main characters that the background in which they set these characters becomes a parade of dramatic foils drawn either from whole cloth or from biblical typological tradition.

For example, the Vitae of Shenoute and his ally Makarios manifestly portray them as new versions of the prophet Elijah, an identification apparently often made for charismatic Christian figures of this period. Dramatic encounters between Christian leaders and pagans in these texts thus tend to recall the biblical story of Elijah and the priests of Ba’l (1 Kings 18), leading to the common if premature conclusion that all such religious clashes in Coptic literature were drawn up entirely to reenact this story.³⁵ Athanasius in his Life of Antony and Shenoute in his sermons depend rhetorically upon caricatures of a paganism populated with Greek gods (inverted as demons) to such a degree that their capability to reflect contemporaneous native religious practices might also fall into doubt.³⁶ The anonymous biographer of Makarios of Tkôw asserts that local temples engaged in the ritual sacrifice of Christian children, a broad motif of ancient novels, which made a specialty of imagining cannibalistic races, and of ancient religious polemic as well.³⁷ One can indeed wonder whether such encounters between Christian saint and pagan are memories, albeit imprecise, or dramatic motifs based on literary typology and caricature, just as ideological competitors within Christianity tended to be castigated as Manichees, Gnostics, Arians, or other grossly anachronistic categories.³⁸

But battle with native religion actually does not occur so widely or consistently in late antique hagiography that one can designate it as a literary motif in its own right. Sometimes the native religious institution is described merely as part of an ascetic’s personal background. Particularly outside Egypt the native religion is depicted as a more inchoate world of folk healers with whom the saint or the saint cult is in competition.³⁹ Coptic hagiographers do indeed cast their heroes as new Elijahs or Daniels in their dramatic encounters with native priests and cults: Makarios of Tkôw can even call down fire from heaven upon the temple of Kothos. But the Elianic references cluster around just these dramatic dénouements, the actual battles (or thaumaturgical displays) that eradicate the native cults—the fire from heaven, the miraculous floods—and tend not to control the descriptions of the cults themselves.

What stand out distinctly from the biblical typologies and rhetorical caricatures are the details of these cults, which conform to no literary tradition. For example, despite the allegations of child sacrifice (which are easily recognized as ahistorical), the temple of Kothos and its priesthood in the story of Makarios of Tkôw are credibly described as the cultic center of a piety based normally in house shrines, which the author describes in detail. Thus the priesthood in the story inspires the protective instincts of local people against Makarios and his monks, a striking contrast to the sentiments of Elijah’s audience in 1 Kings 18 and to the widespread motif of conversion narratives in which populaces would rise up against their temples and the pagan élite who controlled them. In the story of the monk Moses of Abydos, who does battle with a demon named Bes in an Egyptian temple, the anonymous author explicitly invokes Elijah and Daniel but gives credible information about native piety that could depend on no literary sources: the specific ranks of Egyptian priests he encounters, local concern for temples, and the name and iconography of Bes, who was one of the most popular deities among ordinary Egyptians of the Roman period.⁴⁰ Even Shenoute breaks out of polemical caricature occasionally to give a demon’s local name (Min, Petbe, Shai—all gods otherwise attested in the third and later centuries) or a detail of popular religious piety (figurines, amulets) of which we have an immense corpus for the Roman period.⁴¹ Besa’s description of a village’s attempt to repel Shenoute and his monks using ritual substances conforms to what we know of official execration rites practiced in Egyptian temples from ancient times.⁴²

It is not difficult to perceive historically authentic reflections of native religious practice in Coptic (or, for that matter, Greek, Syriac, and Latin) hagiography even while admitting the genre’s dependence on biblical typology, literary caricature, and an overall ideological agenda that steers the author away from historical precision and toward a self-contained and fantastic world of the saint’s exaltation. To discover these authentic details one must begin with the documentary evidence, to be alert for credible details in literary texts. One must bring a familiarity with the literary workings of typology, caricature, and motif in late antique literature: how these techniques, in the process of directing the audiences’ attention toward typological meaning, actually leave spaces for details to be authentic—‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them,’ as the poet Marianne Moore